Crews were scrambling today to clean up the spill before rain and snow moved into the area where oil was threatening a creek winding through beaver ponds before running into the Dolores River — which eventually empties into the Colorado River.

Meanwhile, about 50 miles to the northeast, the Washington, D.C.-based Americans for Prosperity and American Energy Alliance brought the “Energy for America Tour” to Grand Junction today, before heading to Craig, Colo., this evening.

“This whole bus tour is designed to remind people that we are a resource rich nation,” Jeffrey Hubbard, media director for the American Energy Alliance told the Craig Daily Press. “If we had access to these natural resources, we could create good-paying jobs and with those good-paying jobs we could have economic growth. The only obstacle standing in our way is Congress and unelected bureaucrats at the EPA.”

However, the industry tracking Baker Hughes Rig County recently reported oil production in the United States is at record levels – higher than any point since the Reagan administration.

The scenic Dolores River, especially upstream from Gateway, has been touted as an unparalleled outdoor recreation destination currently threatened by uranium mining.

Agema was slated to discuss his bill to prohibit Michigan courts from recognizing any foreign law that conflicts with the constitution. While Agema claims the law is not targeting Shariah law, he uses Shariah as an example when he speaks of the legislation.

Agema said that he was unaware of his scheduling conflict until Tuesday afternoon while he was at a Habitat for Humanities event. Staff from his office called him when inquiries about his appearance with Jones started coming in. Agema called Terpening and left the voice mail Terpening posted on his website.

Agema said had he not had the scheduling conflict he would have appeared on the steps with the controversial pastor.

“I’d have only talked about my bill,” the Republican lawmaker said. “I would not be there to talk about his agenda.”

Terpening and Jones contended last week that Agema had called Jones’ Florida church and asked if he could speak at Jones’ rally.

Terpening arranged the rally with Jones last week as part of the launch of a new project to get voters to reject all incumbents. The 34-year-old has a checkered history, including criminal convictions dating back to 1997, the Michigan Department of Corrections Offender Database reports. Among his convictions are charges for uttering and publishing, embezzlement and fleeing a police officer.

“I am here because the Blue Green Alliance is an important player in mobilizing the environmental and labor communities to develop the clean energy agenda,” said former Congressman Mark Schauer, who now runs the Blue Green Alliance. “Those jobs will help us compete in the global competition for jobs — and it is global. We don’t win that competition by cutting education.”

Capitol Committee officials say the crowd was between 4,500 to 5,000 people, but organizers told the crowd the number was 10,000.

“Gov. Snyder said he wanted shared sacrifice,” said Sen. Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing). “But it is clear once again that he and the GOP leaders are falling back on picking the same old winners and losers they have always relied on.”

Snyder’s budget has been assailed by a broad coalition of groups because of plans to eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit and to start taxing pension incomes for seniors. The budget also eliminates the Michigan Business Tax and its dreaded 22 percent surcharge and replaces it with a flat six percent business tax. That move results in furthering the budget deficit the legislature has to overcome to nearly $3 billion.

Robert Quackenbush, 68, says he dedicated 51 years of his life to working, including 35 years in a foundry in Saginaw. He did that, he said, so he could get a modest retirement pension.

“I earned what I got,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of some one trying to take it away.”

Terry Miller, 67, chimed in on the conversation at this point. “That’s what we put our time in for. So we could retire and enjoy it.”

Miller is a retired UAW worker from Flint.

“The middle class came with the union and it will go away with the union,” Miller said.

“This is the worst it’s ever been in my lifetime,” said Quackenbush, commenting on legislation unions say will undermine organized labor’s collective bargaining power.

Snyder’s former Democratic rival, Virg Bernero, deliver an impassioned populist speech to the crowd.

“It’s not the money changers on Wall Street that make America work. It’s not the big banks that make America work. It’s you,” Bernero roared at the raucous crowd.

Bernero took a swipe at the GOP, claiming they were rehashing trickle down economic theory that, he said, had proven to be a failure. Growing the economy, he argued, starts with the workers, not the rich.

“If you take care of the grass roots…good things will grow up!”

On Tuesday, a number of tea party organizations are gathering at a FreedomWorks “Restoring America Summit and Rally” at Pittsburgh International Airport’s Embassy Suites to soak up insights from the likes of FreedomWorks’ own founder Dick Armey on school choice, public unions, tort reform and the privatization of Pennsylvania state entities, among other issues.

Scheduled to speak alongside the former U.S. House majority leader include: Freedom Works CEO Matt Kibbe; Frederick Douglass Foundation Chairman Timothy F. Johnson; Fox News contributors Deneen Borelli, Mary Katherine Ham, and Tammy Bruce; The War Room’s Rose Tennent, and “Thomas Paine,” the character Bob Basso plays on YouTube.

Other event co-sponsors include Washington County PA 9.12 Project, PennsylvaniaTeaParty.com, Mercer County TEA Party, Protective Precious Metals, Marley Financial Group, Watchdog Radio, We the People Greene County and the Pittsburgh Tea Party Movement.

The rally is the third FreedomWorks-sponsored event happening in Pennsylvania this month. Previously the group partnered with the Kitchen Table Patriots for a school choice event in Doylestown, Penn., and with the Lehigh Valley 9.12 Tea Party Group for an event in Center Valley, Penn., that focused on ending teacher strikes.

FreedomWorks has been outspoken about trying to abolish collective bargaining rights for all Pennsylvania employees and recently started a petition calling for legislation that would do so.

The Frederick Douglas Foundation’s emphasis on this particular event appears on the issue of school choice, pushing the notion that charter schools are the answer to high dropout rates among black youth — and that state teachers unions are part of the problem.

In a statement on Tuesday’s event, the FDF’s Tim Johnson said:

“We have to stop this ‘School to Prison’ pipeline and provide all parents with real educational choices like charter schools. Educating children is not about satisfying the teachers unions or the bureaucrats who are more concerned about keeping their healthy salaries or job security! … If we are serious about leaving our children and grandchildren with an America we had the opportunity to grow up in, we better make sure they are able to read, write and perform basic math skills. If they can’t get these basic and essential survival tools from their local public schools at taxpayers expense, we better make sure they get them from somewhere.”

Overall, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and Democrats to talk up the pernicious effects of anonymous spending on campaigns, it only seems to have registered for about a quarter of the population, while concerns about voter fraud or vote suppression only caught the attention of about one in five Americans. There’s also a slight partisan trend picked up by the Pew Survey in awareness of both topics — Democrats were slightly more aware of the anonymous spending issue, while Republicans were a good deal more tuned into reports of voter fraud or suppression. This follows naturally from the stated concerns of both parties; a part of me expected that partisan divide to be even bigger.

Attendees of the mass rally head for the Lincoln Memorial on Oct. 2. (Jesse Zwick/TWI)

Members of the Socialist Party lined the tree-shaded walkway that guided tens of thousands of self-dubbed progressives and union members of all stripes to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Passing out a newspaper with the headline, “Tax The Rich, End The Wars,” one eager party member beseeched the passers-by. “You can’t disagree with this,” he kept saying.

[Congress1] “Get your ‘End The War’ sign. Good for the next war,” yelled a good-natured peace activist who stood nearby. Code Pink, the group for antiwar women, and a sizable contingent of D.C. Statehood activists tabled not far away.

But the majority of the marchers, attending alongside their local union or progressive group members, moved steadily on in order to get a good spot on the National Mall and remind the nation that liberalism, as a concept, was not dead. It’s just been hibernating.

Indeed, the main focus of yesterday’s gathering, called One Nation Working Together and sponsored by nearly 500 progressive organizations, was jobs, and how the government should do more to promote them. This was evidenced by the thousands of signs and t-shirts that promoted the event’s main theme — “Jobs, Justice, and Education” — as well as its heavily unionized supporters.

“We bailed out the banks and the insurance companies. Now it’s time to bail out the American people,” urged the Rev. Al Sharpton, who drew some of the loudest cheers of the afternoon.

“I hope they look at the mall, because this is what America looks like,” he added. “Not one color or one gender.”

Sharpton’s remark about the diversity of the crowd, whose ranks included teamsters, electrical workers, teachers, auto workers, peace activists, and immigration reformers of all colors, rang true. But it may have also been an implicit dig against the tea party movement, whose rally the event was designed, in part, to rival.

Most signs stuck to bland, nonpartisan one-word cries like “Together,” “Forward,” or “Jobs,” but a few got at the nature of the rivalry as well. “I Want My Country Forward, Not Back,” read one of them, subtly challenging a common tea party trope. “Tea Parties are for Little Girls and their Imaginary Friends,” read another, less subtle one-liner.

But the largely broad, noncontroversial themes touted by the event succeeded in allowing the many progressive groups who signed on to join forces and put on a show of force the likes of which have been seldom seen since President Obama took office in 2008.

“We’re just so excited that all the progressives are working together because we notice a lot of times progressives each have their own little cause, but this time we’re all in it,” gushed Alice Hoffman, from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers Local Three.

As to the main demand — jobs — attendees from all the groups agreed the country needed far more, but they posed a wide variety of responses about how to get them.

“We really believe that the people are hurting because the money is going to the wrong place,” noted Jane Dugdale of Mainline Peace Action, a group in suburban Philadelphia. “The military is being used to build an empire around the world that is breaking and bankrupting our country.”

“The jobs, the jobs, the jobs, the jobs,” said Michael Bartlett of the New York Teachers Union in response to what the most important issue for Obama should be. “It’s as simple as that. 90 percent of the old jobs have left here and we’ve become a service economy, but we still have to encourage [companies] to employ more people instead of laying off more people.”

“We have to start building up America again,” agreed Helen Lugo of the United Auto Workers, who’d travelled along with her local union by bus from Georgia. “We need to start exporting and stop importing,” she noted. “Something’s got to be equalized over here.”

The slashing of state and local social and educational services also ranked high on attendees’ list of grievances.

“Most of my childhood friends died over some dumb stuff, it’s like we all on some slum stuff, whatever happened to that we shall overcome stuff?” rapped Black Ice, a poet who provided entertainment between speakers. “What’s a young boy to do when he want to do right but there’s a lock on the right door? When he has the heart of a soldier and the aggression of a prize fighter but no one’s taught him what to fight for?”

Beyond putting pressure on the federal government for more jobs and services, however, the event was designed to encourage turnout for the 2010 midterm elections during a year that many Democrats have fretted about a lack of voter enthusiasm coming from their side of the political spectrum.

“2008 was not the end but the beginning,” urged Rev. Sharpton. “When I was in school we had midterm exams…. Well, we’ve got four weeks until the midterm exam and we’ve all got to go home and hit that pavement, knock on doors, and get ready for it.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sounded a similar appeal to union workers and progressive groups at the event as well. “Promise you won’t let anyone quiet us or turn us against each other. Promise to make your voices heard for jobs, justice, and education today — and on election day,” he urged the crowd. “Our best days are ahead, not behind us, and we will fight for them, and we won’t let anyone stand in our way.”

Attendees at the event yesterday appeared to get the message, but whether it translates into ramped up voter turnout for Democrats in November remains an open question.

“I think we will still support Obama, but he has to understand the plight of the ordinary man on the street,” noted Bartlett. “We realize that [doing more] is a difficult proposition for him, but he must also realize that we’re the same group who helped him get elected, so he can’t forget Main Street.”

Beck spent a segment of his Fox News show decrying the march – and pointing out that among the more than 400 groups that have signed on are the Communist Party USA and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America.

“All of these groups, and the president of the United States, want nothing short of fundamental transformation of America,” Beck said on a recent show. “Do not allow them to get away with the lies! Do not allow them to say that we are just ‘one nation, working together.’ ‘We’re just trying to put America back to work, and putting America back together.’ These people, a lot of them, have fought their entire life to destroy America!”

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, who’s playing a leading role in organizing the event, described the coalition somewhat differently, telling the Post that “What unites our coalition is a common goal to pull America back together and put America back to work. We are unified through a deep concern over a lack of civility in the political discourse. We are unified around our common vision of an America where we acknowledge our differences and work together to solve problems.”

It’s a nice, albeit somewhat vague message that has managed to bring together a diverse coalition of progressive groups from African American churches to LGBT groups, but whether it’s enough to motivate progressives across the country to show up at the polls in November remains an open question.

Denise Gray-Felder, communications director for One Nation Working Together, tells me that they “certainly hope that people will remain energized and engaged and carry that energy into the voting booth on Nov 2.” One Nation is registering as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Gray-Felder notes, and as such it won’t be doing any direct political advocacy. She confirms, though, that getting out the vote will most definitely be a central mission of the group going forward.

“There is a major civic engagement and public education component,” she explains. “We’ll have get-out-the-vote information, and we’ll be giving out voter registration applications, so that is a big, big component of the next step of our strategy…. There is a civic engagement staff that’s part of the One Nation team, doing social media outreach, and there’s also a face-to-face component where, as of first thing Sunday, people will be out going door-to-door. People at the rally will be asked to make a commitment to make ten calls, recruit least two friends to volunteer, and volunteer at least ten hours getting out the vote.”

Back in October, a bitter feud broke out between the Tea Party Patriots and the Tea Party Express, with the former accusing the latter of aligning too closely with the GOP. Then, in March, the Tea Party Express alleged that Scott Ashjian, a self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada, was a Democratic plant working to get Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) re-elected.

Now, the stage has moved to Florida, where an Orlando rally this weekend saw Tea Partiers criticizing the Florida Tea Party’s motives.

The rally, organized by Americans for Prosperity, brought together several dozen people to oppose the “big government policies” of Reps. Suzanne Kosmas and Alan Grayson, Florida freshmen on the Republican “hit list” of vulnerable Democratic incumbents. Speakers denounced excessive regulation and government spending, and several reserved special wrath for the Florida Tea Party, which they fear could hurt their side’s chances in November.

The long-simmering dispute between party and movement took on new significance last week as the party entered a spate of new candidates before Friday’s filing deadline. Activists claim the Democratic Party is behind many of the candidates.

Bruce O’Donahue, part of the crowded field of contenders in the Republican primary vying to challenge Grayson for the District 8 congressional seat, held a press conference Thursday in the same location as Saturday’s rally. He condemned the Tea Party and its candidate, Peg Dunmire, who he called a “Grayson stooge.”

Grayson’s response, as quoted by Politico: “All right, you got me. I invented the Tea Party. Sarah Palin is a puppet, and she does whatever I tell her to do.”

By the filing deadline Friday, the party had slated 20 candidates in Florida races.

“While a few Tea Party candidates across the state do have ties to the tea party movement, in the majority of instances, it appears that the Democrats have coordinated a dishonest attempt to hide phony candidates behind the name ‘tea party’ and to confuse voters who may be supportive of the tea party movement, effectively stealing votes from true conservative candidates and injuring the grassroots tea party movement as a whole,” Republican Party of Florida chair and state Rep. John Thrasher said in a statement.

“Despite their beliefs, the black helicopters are not coming to get John Thrasher,” Democrat spokesman Eric Jotkoff shot back in the St. Petersburg Times.

Jason Hoyt, a local radio host who helped establish the Tea Party movement in Orlando, says the party makes a mockery of the movement that shares its name (a fact that is the subject of an ongoing legal battle). He adds that the Tea Party has caused confusion among supporters. ”Everywhere we go, we have to make this disclaimer,” he says.

He says the movement plans to back “constitutional conservatives” in Republican primaries for reasons of both tactics (a united conservative front stands a better chance at winning in November) and principle (the movement believes candidates should be chosen by a popular vote, not selected by a party).

The fact that Fred O’Neal, the party’s one-man executive committee, was once a registered Democrat also raised the suspicions of Tea Partiers, including Dan Fanelli, another candidate in the Republican Primary for Grayson’s seat, who says the party invited him to be its candidate in that race.

Don’t expect Florida to be the last stop for this show.

“[Rep.] Bart Stupak [D-Mich]” says he has twelve ‘no’ votes,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who spoke at a 10 a.m. rally organized by multiple Tea Party groups. “I can count one — Bart Stupak. I can’t name number two. There’s eleven anonymous people and you can’t count anonymous votes. If you can’t count them, they’re not no votes. I think that’s something that should have been pressed much, much harder.”

At the rally, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) informed Tea Partiers they had “won every inning” of the health care fight and were in the “bottom of the ninth.” After her speech, she made it clear to reporters: “I think it’s a flip of a coin right now whether it will pass or not.”

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) acknowledged — based on the history of such tough votes — that more Democrats might vote “aye” than were being counted in public “whip counts.” He was hopeful that pro-life Democratic holdouts would be convinced by the argument that “this will be the biggest expansion of abortion since Roe. v. Wade.” But he was also looking past the vote to his home state, where Republicans are looking at legislation to opt out of a health care mandate.

The most confidence I heard came from Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who said that he’d “heard of” Democrats being fed false information about what could be fixed in reconciliation.

“I know they don’t have the votes right now,” said Broun. “As soon as Nancy Pelosi has 216 votes, we’ll have the vote, even if it’s in the middle of the night.”

King, however, expressed more nervousness.

“I’d rather serve in the minority,” said King, “however long they send me back here to do that, that I would live under this socialism that they’re trying to impose upon us. I can’t sleep at night.”

See a slideshow of the rally here.